Nodal L:earning in this New Age
Having been conditioned to Google searches and Wikipedia learning over the years, not only is how I access information from the knowledge of the world changing, but my neural and cognitive processes are changing as well.
I’ve evolved from being the young man who read all the books, often repeatedly, and learning by rote to that man who now scans pages and opts for creating a quick neural map instead. I no longer read all the books to remember information, sound intelligent, do schoolwork, or satisfy my curiosity; instead, I keep a catalog of tabs in my mental library and search for those keywords whenever I need to recall or validate what I already ‘think’ I know. With each new bloc of information I come across, I find myself subconsciously filtering through my old tabs and tacking new links onto the mnemonic latticework I’ve been constructing in my head since Google launched in 98.
For example, instead of memorizing the key events of Nigeria’s independence, I only need to remember Lord Lugard or 1960. When the conversation on Nigeria’s independence comes up, I recall any of these words, and the nodes start to connect. Where they don’t, or where key linkages are missing, I do a quick Google search prompted by my missing mental cues, and these memory synapses are bridged.
Mind Over Matter
Another dimension is how my mind map has changed over time as a result of the technological advancements in the field of data and information organization.
When Wikipedia and Web 2.0 began to take center stage in my personal and professional life, I became Alice (or let’s say Alex) and endless strings of hyperlinks became my rabbit hole. It isn’t unusual for me to hear something from a casual conversation or a TV show for example, a local conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and my curiosity pulls me away from the screen to search for it. Where is Bosnia on the map, what is the population of the city? What is its culture, architecture, and history?
Most times, I click the Wikipedia link that Google brings up, partly out of habit, and partly for the fact that Wikipedia gives me the broadest overview of most things. As I read about Bosnia, I follow the hyperlinks to the people, events, and other subjects closely or remotely connected to Bosnia. I might end up reading about how Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, the history of the Austrian monarchy, social stratification by caste, morganatic marriages, or World Wars. From one page to another, these hyperlinks open into new worlds that take me deeper into the subject or further away from it.
One hour later, I am on YouTube learning how to pronounce difficult Irish words before extricating myself from the tangled web.
Millions of bytes later, I have indexed new tabs to my mental library and made additional connections between seemingly disparate thought strands and concepts that continue to grow into an ever-expanding tree of Porphyry*.
Learning
Learning in the present times is more about constantly going off on tangents and seeing how my new discoveries connect to the whole, opening up new vistas of knowledge. There is a joy that comes with it, especially for a bookhead like me. Most times, it feels like living alone in a librarynth where it is never nighttime, where the knowledge of the world comes alive, holds your hand, and guides you through the maze. At each turn, there is a white rabbit with pink eyes hurrying down the corridor, beckoning for me to run along.
I can’t tell where all this will lead, but I will place my bets on these outcomes.
Increasingly, our civilization will lean on technology for general knowledge and our collective capacity for information assimilation and retention will reduce drastically.
Physical actions that externalize our thoughts such as writing, drawing, art, and poetry, will move deeper into AI territory. More value will be placed on creating the creator than creating the content. How we express ourselves will also be greatly influenced by what software considers technically correct.
More value will be placed on vicarious activities in the form of entertainment to fill the vacuum that is left behind from delegating thought and creation to a technology that is continuously optimizing human processes.
As the knowledge base of the world continues to grow and AI becomes more sentient, there will be a shift in focus to tribal, ethnic, and sectoral knowledge that is walled up by language or ancient customs and currently unavailable to the rest of the world.
There still won’t be a war of the worlds where an AI army takes away all our jobs or colonizes us and turns us into slaves. Nope!
If I’m still alive in fifty years, I’ll come back to this article in fifty years to see how these predictions have panned out. If I’m dead, my digital clone will return to check and publish a follow-up AI-generated article on whether or not I was right.
Osundolire Ifelanwa